Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
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But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
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The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.
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Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
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Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.
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This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
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Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
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London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
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I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
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To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
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Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
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While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
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How can I express the darkness?
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
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if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
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For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
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For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together.
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When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.